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Flutter 3.47

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Re: Flutter 3.47

#131

Post by lifty »

hypendev wrote: post #106
meerita wrote: post #81

I still prefer React Native with Expo over Flutter, mostly for practical reasons: * Language and hiring: TypeScript has a much larger developer pool. Dart is a solid language, but finding experienced Flutter engineers is harder. * Platform model: React Native maps much more naturally to native platform concepts. Flutter owns much more of the rendering stack, which is powerful, but also creates another abstraction lay…

As someone who used all these frameworks professionally for years, I highly agree. Although, I do not prefer Expo due to it's highly annoying build system and dependency hell, but React Native itself in that case. While I understand Google wants a horse in this race, Flutter doesn't feel like a horse to bet on. - Dart is a really _ugly_ language with lots of tiny annoyances. Its as if someone took worst parts of Java…

I’ve been keeping an eye on hypen.space and hope it succeeds. What is the level of maturity now and are there any multiplatform app examples that are not trivial?

Re: Flutter 3.47

#132

Post by junaid1460 »

I just moved out last month, it's just pain after sometime now, it's okay and good for mobile cross, when it comes to desktop, I'd have to struggle to support linux with quick hangs

Re: Flutter 3.47

#133

Post by AbuAssar »

hypendev wrote: post #106
meerita wrote: post #81

I still prefer React Native with Expo over Flutter, mostly for practical reasons: * Language and hiring: TypeScript has a much larger developer pool. Dart is a solid language, but finding experienced Flutter engineers is harder. * Platform model: React Native maps much more naturally to native platform concepts. Flutter owns much more of the rendering stack, which is powerful, but also creates another abstraction lay…

As someone who used all these frameworks professionally for years, I highly agree. Although, I do not prefer Expo due to it's highly annoying build system and dependency hell, but React Native itself in that case. While I understand Google wants a horse in this race, Flutter doesn't feel like a horse to bet on. - Dart is a really _ugly_ language with lots of tiny annoyances. Its as if someone took worst parts of Java…

hypen looks very similar to SlintUI, isn't it?

Re: Flutter 3.47

#134

Post by sgt »

tcfhgj wrote: post #127
victorbjorklund wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most cases yes but if you don’t want native elements and you want your app to look exactly the same on android as on iOS then flutter is a better choice. Assuming you don’t have any performance limitiations.

Why would you want apps on different os look exactly the same?

I don't think you'd want to in most cases, but adapting to different platforms takes energy and thought. For business CRUD apps you may just want to ignore that and get something out that works well.

Re: Flutter 3.47

#135

Post by tancop »

wiradikusuma wrote: post #92
meerita wrote: post #81

I still prefer React Native with Expo over Flutter, mostly for practical reasons: * Language and hiring: TypeScript has a much larger developer pool. Dart is a solid language, but finding experienced Flutter engineers is harder. * Platform model: React Native maps much more naturally to native platform concepts. Flutter owns much more of the rendering stack, which is powerful, but also creates another abstraction lay…

You should try Dart/Flutter again, they've improved a lot. - Dart. It's richer than JS/TS with stronger type safety, and seems purpose-built for UI. Fewer Dart developers than JS, but I'd argue those JS developers cannot be immediately effective coding React Native (Expo) anyway. - Emulated components vs. real native components. For multi-platform apps, this is actually desirable. These kinds of apps have their own d…

> it's unsolvable since you need to download the whole world (a few MBs) to have the app running on your browser

another reason why the web should move from whole app bundling to content addressed CDNs for library code. you would only need to download one copy for each framework version not every site. and its easy to make it decentralized with IPFS if you want.

Re: Flutter 3.47

#136

Post by zigzag312 »

phist_mcgee wrote: post #122
wiradikusuma wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should try Dart/Flutter again, they've improved a lot. - Dart. It's richer than JS/TS with stronger type safety, and seems purpose-built for UI. Fewer Dart developers than JS, but I'd argue those JS developers cannot be immediately effective coding React Native (Expo) anyway. - Emulated components vs. real native components. For multi-platform apps, this is actually desirable. These kinds of apps have their own d…

They still haven't got native scrolling perfect for iOS. I used a big name app just today and I could instantly tell without looking it up that it was a flutter app, because the scrolling felt non-native.

Scrolling is like an Achilles' heel of Flutter. There's still no smooth scrolling with mouse for web.

Re: Flutter 3.47

#138

Post by GeneralMaximus »

tcfhgj wrote: post #127
victorbjorklund wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most cases yes but if you don’t want native elements and you want your app to look exactly the same on android as on iOS then flutter is a better choice. Assuming you don’t have any performance limitiations.

Why would you want apps on different os look exactly the same?

Why would you not?

I use Ableton, Figma, and Emacs regularly. I have a decade (or more) of muscle memory around these apps. If they suddenly decided to adopt the look, feel, and conventions of their underlying host platform, I’d be very upset.

If I’m using Emacs, I don’t want to use Cmd+S to save my files on macOS and Ctrl+S on Windows. I’ve already memorized C-x C-s. I don’t want Ableton to adopt whatever new design language Apple or Microsoft is chasing this week. I want to open the app and find the UI controls looking and behaving exactly the same as they’ve looked and behaved since I started using it in 2014. I want to write code, make music, do design. I don’t want to be frustrated because the button for enabling the metronome is 15px to the left on Windows vs. macOS.

Apps that look and feel native only make sense in two cases:

1. The app is tied to the platform. E.g. Logic Pro. It can integrate deeply into macOS and use the native widget set because it will never run on any other platform. Same for Bear, Things, Pixelmator, Omni Group apps, etc.

2. The app is a replaceable, throw-away utility. I call these “fungible apps”. For example, it doesn’t really matter which Mastodon or Bluesky client you use. There are hundreds of them, and they’re not complex enough that the loss of familiarity or muscle memory matters very much. You can use one client on Windows, a different one on macOS, and a third one on Linux, and it’ll be fine. They can all be native to their platforms, or not. The interaction model is simple enough that you can afford to have a different one on every platform.

For apps that really matter—the apps I use to put food on the table—I absolutely want them to look and feel exactly the same on every platform. The app is the OS, the actual OS is just a hardware abstraction layer.

Can Flutter be used to build apps like Figma or Ableton or Emacs? I actually don’t think so. It’s a poor toolkit for building anything that must last for more than 3-5 years. If you care about longevity, there are basically only three options in 2026: Qt, Electron, or roll your own like Zed/Sublime.

Re: Flutter 3.47

#139

Post by nmfisher »

hypendev wrote: post #106
meerita wrote: post #81

I still prefer React Native with Expo over Flutter, mostly for practical reasons: * Language and hiring: TypeScript has a much larger developer pool. Dart is a solid language, but finding experienced Flutter engineers is harder. * Platform model: React Native maps much more naturally to native platform concepts. Flutter owns much more of the rendering stack, which is powerful, but also creates another abstraction lay…

As someone who used all these frameworks professionally for years, I highly agree. Although, I do not prefer Expo due to it's highly annoying build system and dependency hell, but React Native itself in that case. While I understand Google wants a horse in this race, Flutter doesn't feel like a horse to bet on. - Dart is a really _ugly_ language with lots of tiny annoyances. Its as if someone took worst parts of Java…

> Dart is a really _ugly_ language with lots of tiny annoyances. Its as if someone took worst parts of Java and Javascript and turned them into a language. Terrible to write, terrible to read, terrible to use.

While I’m a bit ambivalent towards Flutter, I totally disagree with you on Dart. To me it’s a better version of Java/Typescript with a very mature cross-platform and JIT/AOT compiler. Admittedly there are some things I wish they would take from TS (like discriminated unions), and I haven’t tried “modern” Java either so maybe that’s improved, but even so, I rarely feel like Dart is getting in the way.

Re: Flutter 3.47

#140

Post by satvikpendem »

palata wrote: post #89
skybrian wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose AI would help for porting your app if you need to? It's not like the old days.

Unless it is a trivial app, it would still require quite some effort to port (and test), which has a cost. What do you gain by using Flutter that compensates for that risk?

Working on all devices with minimal effort. That's what I use it for anyway, anything else like a sound null safe language with Dart are just a bonus.
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